I proclaimed that Quantico is my favorite new show of the season, and I stand by it. Granted, I’m not watching a long list of new shows, but it’s already bumped to one of my favorites in general. I can’t wait to see what’s coming next. It hooked me within 5-10 minutes. Kudos. It’ll also be difficult for me to see some of these actors as new characters, because I already knew some of them on sight. Josh Hopkins is going to be the most difficult as the FBI teacher Liam, because Cougar Town is one of my favorite sitcoms and he starred in that. Anyway I knew very little going into this show outside of it was about FBI students and that one of them might be behind a terrorist attack. Although honestly? That’s basically a good summary of everything placed in here, just that there are a lot of twists involved even in the first hour. So let’s get started!

The main character is Alex Parrish, played by the wonderful Priyanka Chopra. I know she was the Miss World winner and that she’s very popular in India. I can see why considering I loved her right off the bat. Alex is a great mix of characteristics that make her likable but fierce. She’s funny, sexy, friendly, dangerous, and has a few secrets of her own. We start out with her waking up from a terrible terrorist attack that destroyed Grand Central. It’s pretty clear from early on that they were going to suspect her, as currently the only survivor of it, but she says she can’t remember what happened. They bring her to a wall of all her other fellow FBI students and says one of them is behind it. So she needs to retrace her steps to her first few days at Quantico and piece together who it might be. We also get to see each of the major leads secretly get to Quantico. Alex has a quick affair with fellow trainee Ryan (Jake McLaughlin) although her good assessment of him proves to be false since she didn’t pick out he was FBI too. There’s a few twists about him later that are definitely intriguing, but I wasn’t too fond of him right off the bat. She picked him up as someone who couldn’t be trusted, and clearly, he isn’t.

We also meet highly intelligent and awkward Simon (Tate Ellington). He’s very knowledgeable but stumbles a bit when talking to others, especially his Muslim coworker Nimah (Yasmine Al Masri). I love that he tried to say he’s gay when he crossed a line by opening her door without her consent, and she basically was like “does that make a difference if you’re in my personal space?” NOPE IT DOES NOT. They bandy back and forth a little, but she has secrets of her own. They all have secrets. And that’s sort of the point, as later on FBI teacher Liam (Josh Hopkins) states that they have the full files on everyone at a table. Their mission is to pick one of them and to find out the one redacted secret of the other person using their connections and deducing skills. A major plotline starts out with tension between roommates Eric (Brian J. Smith) and Caleb (Graham Rogers). Eric seems like a squeaky clean Mormon who is perfect for the agency, and Caleb only got in because of his parents influence, but he’s struggling big time. I love that this pretty boy who looks perfect for being the king of the castle ends up being sort of a giant fail, and he’s also funny and awkward. He endeared himself quickly on to me for being that grumpy fail, so well done on their part. There’s also friendly and outgoing Shelby (Johanna Braddy) who makes friends with the girls quickly. I like her! I like everyone, to be honest. The leader of the whole group is Miranda (Aunjanue Ellis) who has some kind of serious backstory with Liam, where he’s an alcoholic and not liked by the FBI currently, and she’s been working hard to break the ceiling as a woman in the agency for awhile. There’s so much backstory with all these characters! I can’t wait to learn more.

We learn a little bit about everyone’s secrets. Shelby’s parents died on 9/11 in one of the planes, and she has a piece of the plane she carries with her. Alex has a secret that she killed her father when he was threatening her mother, although she manages to lie to them that it was her mother who did it instead. She reveals to Liam later that it was her, and that her father was a secret FBI agent too. I think this will come up later because he was saying some suspicious things about her mother. Maybe her mother wasn’t who she said she was either. Simon secretly went to Palestine for a few years to learn about the other side of the Israeli conflict. The real problem comes when Caleb keeps taunting Eric with knowing him, and Eric takes him hostage with a gun, panicked about what he knows. This kind of surprised me, not because he did it, but because the secret in question had to be in the FBI file. Wouldn’t he assume that means the FBI actually knows his secret? What made him think that Caleb found anything they couldn’t? I guess he might’ve felt big guilt over this secret so it was his paranoia talking. During a mission he got a 14 year old pregnant and took her to get an abortion and she died. Caught and guilty, he kills himself in front of everyone. This shakes Caleb to his core, both because he had a gun pointed at him and because he’s not sure he belongs there, so he leaves the program. He’s a main in the show though so we’ll see him again later on.

One other major secret? Nimah is actually a twin sister? And they keep trading places? Weird. How did the FBI miss that? Or did they not miss that? Hmmm. But no one actually knows at the moment. Or do they? Hahaha, hard to say. Also that Ryan is already an FBI agent and Liam hired him to stalk Alex in particular. Liam right now is top on my list of the bad guy this season. I think he is the most suspicious of the future terrorist. Since we don’t know why the attack happened, it could be any number of things, not necessarily for the obvious reasons. He also knows about Alex’s father and it’s possible he’s purposely missing things about people. I’m keeping my eyes on him. In the later time, Alex gets pinned as the one to blame for the attack, and Miranda breaks her out. We don’t know her motivations for why. Ryan is found dead in Alex’s apartment with clearly a lot of material about the terrorist attack. I’m still calling it as Liam, especially because of all the dirt planted there!

This was a great premiere. I do think that maybe the Eric story was unnecessary. I knew him instantly, since he plays Will on Sense8, so I knew he wasn’t going to be a main character. I know it rose the tension and made us all know that any one of them could snap. But it doesn’t make logical sense that he’d believe Caleb would find a secret the FBI couldn’t. What is up with the twins thing? That is a lot of information thrown at us all at once, but I kept up and I think most people did. It clearly trusts its audience to be smart. There’s a lot of characters and I found them all interesting, which is a big feat. And I’m already distrustful of everyone but Alex, which is clearly the way it should be. I just personally hope it’s someone like Liam, I’d rather the POC not end up as the bad guys because we all know that’s a common trope. Or maybe there’s more than one person. It’s a conspiracy! I can’t wait to find out more. It was tense, well acted, and even funny at times. If you like spy dramas or want something exciting this season, put it on your list.